This invention relates to internal combustion engines in general and more particularly to an arrangement for recovering power loss in an internal combustion engine.
An arrangement for recovering the lost power of an internal-combustion engine, comprising a turbine, the driving power of which comes from the power loss of the internal-combustion engine and a generator coupled to the turbine, the generator having a winding, with a d-c motor coupled to the winding relieving the internal combustion engine, is described in European Patent Application No. 0 045 843 (U.S. Pat. No. 4,394,582). The optimum utilization of such an arrangement requires utilizing all of the available driving power of the turbine, i.e., always running with a fully open turbine. On the one hand, lost power and therefore also the power which can be supplied by the generator and used by the electric motor depends on the respective losses and thus, on the operating state of the internal-combustion engine, and is therefore highly variable. On the other hand, the speed of this internal-combustion engine and therefore of the electric motor relieving it can also be variable over a range determined by operating conditions. This is the case particularly in vehicle drives. The problem of utilizing a variable, given generator power with an electric motor, the speed of rotation of which is likewise variable and given, therefore, arises. In general, particularly in vehicle drives, there is no unambiguous correlation between these respectively given operating variables. In the arrangements known so far, adapting the power consumed by the electric motor to the power that can be given off by the generator requires separate controls which means considerble technical effort and financial expenditures which do not seem tolerable especially in vehicle drives operating at relatively low power as well as under large load and speed variations.
It is, thus, an object of the present invention to develop the arrangement described above in such a manner that load matching is possible without a separate control device.